Why call it "The Washington Post" when it could be called "The Washington News" or "The Washington Daily."
To clarify I'm looking for the origins of such (in my opinion) strange names for newspapers and if it had to do with the time period they were formed or if there is a meaning that I am missing out on.
Hi there, here's a thread from a few months ago that deals with this and may be of some interest:
Basically, there are a couple things to keep in mind: first, our modern phenomenon of one-newspaper cities (in the United States, anyhow) is something that's happened over time as competing papers have died out. So there were multiple papers in D.C. at one point, not just the Post, which meant they needed different names. (Mergers like this are also how you get names like the Star-News or Sun-Ledger or Post-Dispatch, etc.)
The "Post" in a lot of newspaper names refers to the postal service, which was a major distributor of early newspapers and other periodicals at a low cost -- the federal government essentially subsidized newspapers by making it cheap to send them around the country. Richard John's Spreading the News is a great source on the early postal system.
Also, to quote myself on some "odd" names from that other thread:
But something that's also worth pointing out is that the overwhelming majority of newspapers in the U.S. from about say 1810 through 1900 or so were partisan (and that partisan tradition carried on in many smaller towns for several decades). So, it wasn't at all uncommon to see the local paper called the Democrat or Republican or Federalist or Anti-Federalist or, in the period I studied in school, the Granger or Farmer's Advocate or even Communist. Newspapers that didn't necessarily have a strong partisan bent might just be called something like Advertiser or Intelligencer or the like. You also get fun mergers where the new publication encompasses both older names, so you get the Democrat-Republican and the like.
There were also a large number of foreign-language newspapers published in the U.S., and in the state I studied they were overwhelmingly German. Zeitung was a popular name; it just means "newspaper," but it could be used with a modifier: Volkszeitung for example, for "The People's Newspaper." You also see some "odd" newspaper names such as the Tribune, named after the Roman tribunes who protected certain classes of citizens. Sun, Star, Beacon and the like are also connected with the idea that newspapers provide enlightenment. Frederick Douglass's paper was called the North Star for obvious symbolic reasons, and the newspaper in Wilmington, N.C. was called the Morning Star for 100+ years. (It later merged with the Sunday News and was called the Star-News, and now StarNews. Marketers ruin everything.) The newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, is called the Daily Camera, because it started being published around the time that photography was able to be published in newspapers, and it made its early living publishing scenes of the Rockies.